ABC Fact Check is less than six months old. We started checking the statements of politicians, leading business figures and policy advocates in August, and since then we've produced over 100 stories, on topics ranging from whether being vegan makes you slimmer to public service sick leave.

There's been a federal election, a change of government and the threat of a debt ceiling crisis, all in the last five months.

Checking the election

The frenetic pace of the election campaign provided a feast for fact checkers, with candidates of all stripes making statements requiring scrutiny.

Remember Kevin Rudd? As his re-election campaign unravelled there was plenty to check.

We found that Mr Rudd's claim of a $70 billion black hole in Coalition costings was not credible - it counted scrapped policies, old policies and some very rubbery figures.

The then prime minister was also wrong when he claimed Tony Abbott cut a billion dollars from the hospitals budget when he was health minister. It was a reduction in spending growth, and it was enacted by his predecessor. And Mr Rudd was incorrect to claim that the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme would cost more than child care. He was comparing 2013 figures with 2015 figures.

But Mr Rudd was not the only Labor MP whose statements didn't always stand up. Then finance minister Penny Wong's claim during the campaign that the Coalition had a $2.4 billion hole in its costings of a plan to shed 12,000 public sector jobs was selective. New South Wales Labor MP Michelle Rowland's assertion that the Coalition had not submitted any policies for costing was also incorrect.

On the other side, we found Joe Hockey conflated net debt and gross debt to exaggerate Labor's spending record.

Mr Abbott was using an outdated figure when he talked about how much households would save without a carbon tax. And still in the environment portfolio, Greg Hunt wasn't telling the full story when he talked about CSIRO research as an example of the way the Coalition's direct action plan might work.

But it wasn't just the Coalition and Labor who grabbed our attention during the five-week campaign. Minor party candidates from the Greens to Bob Katter said plenty worth checking.

Western Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam was exaggerating when he claimed rents had doubled across Australia, and tripled in some states. Greens leader Christine Milne was in the ballpark when she estimated the cost of the Coalition's plan to process refugees on Nauru.

Queenslander Bob Katter's claim that gun deaths rose after changes to Australia's gun laws in 1996 was wrong. Mr Katter wasn't the only small party contender from the sunshine state to make an impact.

The Palmer factor

Businessman Clive Palmer personally earned the most negative verdicts in 2013, a trend that kicked off during his successful campaign to win the Queensland lower house seat of Fairfax.

Among other things, he was wrong when he said infant mortality rates are higher among Indigenous Australians than in Africa, Asia or South America and he was wrong when he claimed asylum seekers are paid more by the government than pensioners.

The streak continued after the election. Mr Palmer was incorrect when he recently said China executes half a million people a year - it's about 5000, not 500,000.

But there was some good news for the owner of Palmersaurus dinosaur park - we did confirm he is worth more than a billion dollars.

That's politics

The slow-down in political pace post-election didn't stop the flow of checkable statements.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne claimed it was probably cheaper for MPs to fly on a VIP jet than a commercial airline. It isn't. Mr Pyne's claim that independently-run public schools produce better results than centrally-controlled counterparts was also unsubstantiated.

Labor's deputy leader Tanya Plibersek got her history of the number of women in cabinet wrong - by about a quarter of a century. In a verdict that prompted much surprised reaction on social media, the fact check showed that the last time there was just one woman in the federal cabinet was in 2001, not 1976.

And we found Environment Minister Greg Hunt was being misleading when he claimed emissions went up under the carbon price. He was using projected figures for the year 2020 which also showed emissions would be even higher without a carbon price.

Mr Abbott was wrong when he said marriage has always been between a man and a woman. That fact check generated more controversy than almost anything else we've done. We found plenty of examples of alternative marriages, including Roman Emperor Nero's two husbands and a variety of culturally different ideas about the institution, like Chinese ghost weddings.

And it turned out the Prime Minister was really splitting hairs when he said there was a world of difference between turning back and towing back asylum-seeker boats. The Coalition's current policy is based on previous turn-back policies, which included tow-backs.

Treasurer Joe Hockey's comparisons between Australia's debt ceiling and the crisis in the United States turned out to be overblown.

And Immigration Minister Scott Morrison is correct when he refers to people arriving in Australia without a visa as having made an "illegal entry". Even though they haven't broken any Australian or international law, and have a right to claim asylum, paradoxically their entry can be described as "illegal".

But Mr Morrison wasn't telling the full story on the number of asylum-seeker arrivals since the Coalition's policy came into force - an independent analysis of the data shows a sharp drop-off began under Labor.

Legal tangles

We looked at the laws around spying and found it was unlikely ASIS had overstepped Australian law by allegedly spying on East Timor or that Australia had broken international or Australian law by allegedly spying on Indonesia. However, Indonesian law does forbid it.

The Prime Minister's claim that Indonesia was obliged to take people picked up in its search and rescue zone was overreach. It turns out there's no legal obligation to do so.

And the rest

We looked at Australian of the Year Ita Buttrose's claim that the glass ceiling still exists in Australia. It turns out she's right. But the Australian Council of Social Services' claim that child poverty is on the rise was overblown. And World Vision Australia's claim that cuts to the foreign aid budget will cost 450,000 lives was not credible.

Rupert Murdoch's claim in October that Australia is on track to becoming the world's most diverse nation checked out. And it turns out that some of the reported auction clearance rates in capital cities are based on incorrect data.

So, what have we learned? As the year comes to an end we can indeed say facts are stubborn, surprising and elusive, but that's what makes them interesting.

Fast facts

In the year to June 2014, 5,204 young Australians spent time in detention centres. A further 10,846 were under community-based supervision.

The rate of Indigenous young people in detention or under community supervision in 2013-14 was 189 per 10,000, substantially higher than the rate of non-indigenous young people of 13 per 10,000.

Under the Citizenship Act of 1948, Australians with dual citizenship who serve in the armed forces of a country at war with Australia cease to be Australian citizens from the time their war service begins.